🔗 Share this article

Ordinarily, the NFL's Head Coach of the Year award adheres to a simple formula. It commonly acts as a type of apology. We regret we got wrong your franchise in our pre-campaign forecasts.

Theoretically, it's a clear-cut line: the coach who oversaw the biggest improvement receives the award. In practice, it creates an annual discussion about expectations and whether we're actually rewarding superior leadership or merely the most shocking surprise.

Yet this year's competition is fundamentally unique. The group of contenders is unusually talented. It has been the year of resurgences. The NFL has been chaotic, with recent division champions fading and longtime also-rans ascending collectively. Under an normal year, a coach leading the his team to the summit of the AFC would make him the clear front-runner. But in such a wild and thrilling season, he's competing with several other elite coaches.

Here is how the hypothetical vote could be structured.

5) Ben Johnson, Chicago Bears, Their Record

Voters for Coach of the Year selectors are fascinated by signal-callers. History shows this. A certain coach in 2017. Another in 2020. Brian Daboll in 2022. Should you transform a quarterback, you're halfway home.

Ben Johnson hasn't just corrected Caleb Williams; he's freed him. In the right ecosystem, the QB has been given the opportunity to display his rare talent. From midseason onward, the Chicago offense rank number four in offensive Expected Points Added per play. This isn't a brief surge – it's consistent excellence. With his guidance, Williams has become increasingly confident, far less reckless, and has willingly surrendered to the gameplan instead of going rogue. It is an offense constructed solely in the coach's vision: a bully-ball run game, a heavy helping of play-action and a imaginative aerial game that springs wide-open targets everywhere. The QB has taken advantage. And when easy reads haven't been there, he's been able to conjure big plays out of broken plays.

Johnson arrived to the Bears with a specific offensive blueprint. Almost every decision – rebuilding the offensive line, highlighting the tight ends, turning Williams into a rhythm passer – has paid off. That's rare for a first-year head coach. And it's even more uncommon still for a leader who entered the organization with the level of hype he did. For consecutive straight offseasons, he was the top name on the coaching carousel. But when it comes to selecting a leader, there are no sure things. Remarkably, he has lived up to expectations – and even surpassed them. He's proven not just to be a offensive dork but the type of leader that can inject fresh energy into an franchise.

During a typical season, he would be the overwhelming choice. Yet this isn't a typical year!

Where Johnson's candidacy comes slightly unstuck is on defense. The Chicago defense currently rank 25th in defensive efficiency. They are living on takeaways, and takeaways are famously fickle. Coaches can focus on creating turnovers, but nobody can ensure it. Johnson is on the ballot because the offensive production is legitimate. He's ranked lower because luck is doing an outsized share of the defense's work. If not for a couple bounces of the ball, the Bears would be several victories worse off. It's been an remarkable turnaround, and the core is established for sustained winning. But Johnson falls short here.

4) The Jacksonville Jaguars Coach, His Team, Their Record

The Jaguars' coach is in a similar spot to Johnson. He's another first-time leader who has orchestrated a swift turnaround. During the crucial final weeks of the season, he has Trevor Lawrence playing the best all-around football of his career. And he's also spearheaded the transformation of a defensive unit that now sits at fifth in the NFL in Expected Points Added per play.

Even more impressively, he has mastered the leadership aspects, which was not a certainty following his early press conference introduction and some of his preseason moves.

The coach walked into Jacksonville with an uncommonly inexperienced coaching staff. Unlike other coaches, who surrounded themselves with the perfect staff mix of youth and experience, he bet on first-timers. Starting with the leader himself to assistants to assistant coaches, the Jags are filled with rookies. That type of approach is intriguing in theory, but often fails in practice – as past failures are a warning – because everybody is learning a their job in real-time. Yet he has managed to bring the entire group and everything together.

Following an initial strong beginning, there was a risk that the season would veer off the track. A mid-year setback caused the team stumbling once more. That's typically when leaders panic and change too much. Coen didn't. Rather, he streamlined things. Jacksonville stopped chasing home-run plays and started hunting reliable ones. The coach recentered the attack around key players and the ground attack, and encouraged Lawrence to use his mobility more often.

The results are evident. The Jaguars have won seven games in a row and will be the conference's number three playoff seed. He gets the tiniest deduction in the rankings because he inherited a talented roster, but he has demonstrated he can get the most out of that talent.

3) The Seattle Seahawks Coach, Seattle Seahawks, Their Record

Each Strong of the Year narrative has a hinge moment. For the Seahawks coach, it was his quarterback decision.

Moving on from a veteran, signing a different signal-caller and pairing him with an innovative play-caller might have derailed the season in the early weeks. Rather, it shaped it. By the middle point of the season, the acquisition was an Most Valuable Player candidate. He has fallen away since that hot streak, dropping to 23rd in EPA per dropback over the latter part of the schedule, putting him just one spot ahead of peers.

Still